ISTE in Second Life

Thanks to my friend Larry Jeffryes for the following notice:

ISTE's Second Life social occurs on Thursdays at 6 PM (Pacific Time). The
ISTE SL docents are very helpful.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents.
Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today
is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. Read more
at http://secondlife.com/whatis/

To explore ISTE's Second Life headquarters, visit
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/93/83/30
If you don't have an account and avatar in Second Life, you'll be
prompted to create one (they're free!). If you already have an account,
you'll need to log in first. The above link will display a map to
ISTE's Island just select "teleport" and you'll be transported
directly there. (You'll need to download and install SecondLife
software.)

I found SecondLife to have a much bigger world than just ISTE. As I
explored the SecondLife world, I teleported to some very interesting
and some very strange virtual worlds. I'm still learning the interface
and a bit confused by this and that at times.

Larry Jeffryes
Los Alamos, NM

USDLA Launches National Distance Learning Week to Increase the Awareness of Distance Learning

Philadelphia, PA (PRWEB) September 19, 2007 -- The United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) will hold the 2007 National Distance Learning Week (NDLW), November 12 -16, 2007. Read all about it! And of course, we plan to have some fun activities for you all! :) ~julz

Did You Know 2.0? Join the Conversation!

For when you have time... 8 minutes on the case for web 2.0 education.

Twitter + Second Life = Spontaneous Web Meetspace

Tech Crunch provides an article about using Twitter and SecondLife to conduct web meetings...
Read the article at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/11/twitter-second-life-spontaneous-web-meetspace/
:)
~julz

NM TIE Podcasting Workshop

I'm helping Bethany today at the NM TIE conference with her podcasting workshop. We started by investigating iTunes and EPN - http://epnweb.org.

Right away, some folks found a couple of very cool things:

• Tamara found Willow Web, an elementary podcast show at EPN and she said she listened to elementary students expressing their knowledge about the constitution in authentic way to an audience of their peers (and a global audience).
• Jim noted that the second language podcasts, specifically the French ones, at EPN were just like taking a class.
• Gail noted that in the general topics of EPN, there were 137 podcasts for English and 9 for math...

Then they came up with some great ideas for uses of podcasts!

• Have students record and edit movies and broadcast via podcast - moviecasting!
• Creating tech instructional podcast on how to do various tasks like email
• Opportunities for training on district-wide systems
• Have students do podcast presentations, thereby addressing the issues of time where you can't get everyone up in front of the class. An immediate win is that students don't often get the opportunity to hear themselves and self-critique until college.
• Virtual campus/school tours
• Audio quiz/audio answers
• Library could do weekly/monthly podcast on new or featured books, bibliographic or library use
• Enhancement to lessons
• Students in the hospital never gets the full class experience, could get more of an experience with a vodcast
• This workshop could have been podcast
• Coaches created podcasts of the team plays and the team listened and learned on the bus

Some advantages were brought up:

• Focused, what you want when you want, just-in-time learning, segmenting, smaller files
• Addressing different learners
• Reaching more students
• Achieving hard to achieve educational goals
• 21st Century Skills addressed

Next everyone is going to use the following to create podcasts right here, right now.

• Gcast - http://www.gcast.com/
• PodcastPeople - http://www.podcastpeople.com/

Lots of fun was had. Wish you'd been here ;)
~julz